Why is there gatekeeping of "professional" repairers and "repair services"? Why can't I as a consumer view a service manual and buy a part? If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.
Because it is these professional repairers lobbying for the laws.
This sort of thing always aims to get the law to identify some kind of professional certification needed to qualify, and then that certification gets more expensive and limited (eg. by saying studying a specific course is needed, but only X thousand places are offered per year).
Eventually, people who have done that course and qualification get so expensive that that becomes their only job, and you won't find a handyman-type person qualified to do those tasks.
It'd be quite ironic if a "right to repair" would have provisions designed to prevent people from repairing their own electronics, because a business interest lobbied for that.
(Contemplate an "open-source" license where the source is provided upon request, to government-licensed software professionals, and otherwise unavailable. We'd be living in this world if history went only very slightly differently. You can't invent that (FOSS) kind of radical sociology after the regulators catch up to you—let alone expect regulators to invent it for you).
Saying Louis Rossmann is fighting for the right to repair while trying to keep individuals from repairing their own devices is like saying Linus Torvalds created Linux to keep people from getting the idea to build their own operating system.
Rossmann is fighting the good fight and also often doing videos showing how a repair actually works.
Most famously a video where he showed that a certain type of common Macbook screen repair is just a simple bent pin that he even repaired for free while the official Apple repair would have cost hundreds of dollars
The stuff that Rossmann repairs are "simple" because he has the tools and expertise to do so. It's very much a "$1 for the screw and $999 to know where to put it" type of situation.
Does everyone realistically expect Apple to have a Rossmann-level repair person[0] in every one of their 528 Apple Stores to do these "simple fixes" with professional gear.
Or is it actually more economical for them to build the equipment for swapping whole boards so simply that anyone with 30 minutes of training can do it. (This is the gear they rent to you when you want to self-repair btw)
[0] 3+ more likely so that they can have vacations and sick days too
Most companies do a simple board swap for the customer, but then send the faulty boards back to the factory to be 'refurbished' - ie. run through the automated test rig and check every function is fully working.
By doing that, an unnecessary board swap is 'free' to the manufacturer - which makes diagnosing problems in the store far easier - just keep swapping parts till the issue is resolved.
When those boards end up back at the factory, they'll pass the test immediately and be able to be sent right out again for another repair.
For boards that don't pass the test, sort them by the failure symptoms and suddenly repair becomes far easier - "these 50 need a new power supply IC, pay someone $25/hour on the rework station to do that, costing $3/board labour and $3/board in components".
I didn't argue that to shame on Apple.
I can understand why that is done ( especially with warranty extensions )
What I am arguing is that there may be a much cheaper ("easier" for the person who knows what to do) way to repair it if you don't care about the warranty but that path can currently be blocked by the manufacturer.
For example: We had a deadline for submitting our final game build last year and my laptop where I had everything setup died a day before the deadline. I went to a local electronics shop, bought a different laptop, removed the SSD from the broken one put it in the new one and was backup and running 30 minutes after returning home.
I would not have cared about warranty there, only about the speed of getting back up and running to meet the deadline.
Yes, he’s a really nice guy and likable and I enjoy his videos too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that he’s highly financially incentivized to hold the positions he does, given he both owns a repair shop and probably makes even more money talking about repairing things on YouTube.
They're not just videos "about repairing". He's teaching people about defects, finding them, and how to repair them. He's selling tools used for repairs, even though someone can start a competing business. It's like you're being sceptical of teachers because they're getting paid.
Why do you think he set up repair.wiki? It's a free resource he started to provide diagnostic and repair guides for a wide range of electronics. He's very transparent about wanting people to be able to repair their own devices and his actions clearly back that up.
These are not the actions of someone being protective of their skills to make more money imo.
> If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.
This is because repair doesn't scale with automation the way manufacturing does. Repair is likely to cost far more, unless you do it yourself, and then it costs you time.
It feels like manufacturers are steering the economy away from consumers "owning" products outright to a model where we consume them through subscriptions or financing arrangements. In this new model, consumers notionally own the product but pay a subscription for repairs. What are the upsides of this shift? Products become more accessible, as the upfront cost is reduced and spread over a longer period. Products last longer because the vendor has an obligation to maintain them for much longer. This is better for the environment; in a world of finite resources, we want our products to last longer.
However, there are considerable downsides. The very notion of ownership is being challenged. Restrictions placed on owners regarding what they can do with their products can limit personalisation, modification, or even resale, thereby reducing the true sense of ownership. While more money circulating in the economy benefits everyone, allowing us to grow while consuming fewer resources, the wealthier members of society will still be able to afford more upfront and get better products. They are likely to be rewarded with lower subscription costs or higher-quality products.
Consider Sam Vimes' "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, which illustrates this point perfectly.[0]
Luckily we have https://elektrotanya.com. All it takes is a little civil disobedience and a few professional repair man to make all those manuals available to everyone in true hacker spirit.
> Why can't I as a consumer view a service manual and buy a part?
Have you ever helped a family member with their computer problems, only to notice that they often start as something benign, and the mess you are dealing with is from the family member attempting to fix that benign problem themselves?
Outside of tech, how many people do you know who actually read manuals instead of just going at it?
> Have you ever helped a family member with their computer problems, only to notice that they often start as something benign, and the mess you are dealing with is from the family member attempting to fix that benign problem themselves?
No, not really. Why do you think this story is relevant here?
I do read manuals. They are usually badly written and often times very hard to understand because of that. Like using terms they don't explain, having multiple interpretations and even referencing buttons that font exists.
For that matter, if documentation to windows or whatever was less incomprehensible, the random people trying to fix computer would had better chance.
I believe this is done partially to dissuade bad actors from gaining easy unverifiable access to hardware and software thus rendering anti theft technology ineffective. If you mandate all repairs to be done using a verifiable (and paid for) repair key which you supply to vetted people, it becomes that much harder to replace the anti theft module as a common thief. Even large scale operations would then be harder to run as they would require a fence of sorts to use as a repairman. Of course that fence would then risk their credentials and so on...
This is very naive view. Anyone that handles stolen goods will have a fence "repairman" (just like they have car breakdown places - in EU only certified establishments can breakdown cars). All it will accomplish is make repair harder not easier while at the same time showing "hey look, we have right to repair".
This is straight out of Lenin's book. How do you do whatever the f** you want when in power? You first redefine language. Then you can do anything. The EU has been at it for quite a while. First we've lost the UK because of this stupid bullshit. Now, the majority of the young population in the western countries like Belgium/Netherlands etc is already majority against the EU. It's only a matter of time it will fall apart. Russian/Middle Eastern corruption and pure homegrown stupidity. This is what is killing the EU right now.
I suspect it's a compromise after pressure from both manufacturers and repair services; manufacturers so that repairs are gatekept, and the cost of repair remains relatively high (because the manufacturers control the supply and cost of replacement parts and tooling, e.g. with Apple providing certified repair places with tools (wasn't that on a lease / rental basis?)); if repair costs remain high because you have to pay someone else to do it, people will consider buying a replacement instead of keeping their devices.
Because not everything can be build to not be dangerous. The potential of electrocution, poisoning from a battery are all real. Not real for you because you're probably smart but you have to think about people who have no idea what they're doing and could get themselves gurt
This is anti-right to repair rhetoric; the potential of electrocution is similarly high when fixing your car or doing your home electrical.
Everyone should be able to fix their own things, AND have the choice to leave it to a professional. Only a few things are legally required to be done by professionals, things like asbestos removal.
So what? Do all the knifes in the supermarket have rounded tips? What if someone stabs themselves with a knife with a sharp tip? Shouldn't we all give up normal knives to protect that one idiot that stabs himself? This is completely silly. No, the state is not your nanny to protect you from yourself.
Things use to come with schematics including devices like Crt TVs that had many thousands of volts with a potential to kill a person instantly.
This whole "omg, the potential of poisoning from a battery or electrocution" (how is it any different if you buy that same battery without the device - perhaps we should ban sales of parts too) is a convenient excuse for manufacturers to make things to be disposable. It has the opposite effect, because the useless device will be thrown into trash and then it will become E-waste with a far bigger potential for poisoning water in some third world country than it ever had by being opened by an "unqualified" person.
There are websites that sell many parts for many appliances (espares.co.uk in the UK, for instance, and they also have many user manuals). I already replaced the handle of an old fridge and the seal of a washing machine that way. Even replaced the toner driver of a laser printer once.
The reality is that this "right to repair" is nothing but political fluff and brings very little or might even make appliances more expensive for consumers.
> If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.
Exactly and there is nothing that can be done about that. Most people aren't going to take their washing machine, or what not, apart by themselves even if parts and manuals are available, which they already are. Hence my previous point.
If your skills become common and accessible (YouTube) and the way to keep them profitable is through regulation, then something is wrong, wouldn’t you say?
We had many examples in history of gatekeeping a skill, most recently with taxi drivers.
Can you imagine similar restrictions imposed on software engineering jobs, say to require a computer science diploma? Not hard to imagine that in 10 years anyone with half a brain and ChatGPT and YouTube will be able to write general purpose, “does the job, good enough” software.
We could value work more independently of its contribution to enrich an employer/board/funder (lots of important work is done through volunteering) and build a sufficient social net that unemployment isn't a problem. With all the productivity gains we made over the last few decades, we could possibly even have no unemployment, if everyone was employed fewer days per week at a full time salary. But we don't want to share the added value we're producing with everyone, do we? We make the choice to prioritize shareholder revenue growth over avoiding catastrophic unemployment.
Has it become catastrophic in the 200 years since the industrial revolution threatened this would be the case, while the world population went up eightfold?
Did the industrial revolution happen over an extremely compressed timeframe and feature machines that can assemble machines based on labor output data?
Yeah, hate that. We also have all kinds of subsidies for insulating your house etc. I insulated my house. Only I did it myself and you’re supposed to let a professional do it. A professional that just charges you his usual fee + the subsidy. They are really helpful in filing the paper work for the subsidy (which is substantial) for just a small extra fee.
